dating gives me anxiety

I mean, first you meet someone and you get excited and you do all these things to impress them.

I wear my favourite clothes when I know I’m going to see him. (Actually, I decide I hate all my clothes, sometimes buy new ones, and then settle on an outfit I can live with.)

I decide to go on a diet, only to start stress-eating m&ms an hour and a half later because he still hasn’t texted me back.

I make sure I’m more or less up on politics and current events (full disclosure: not in any real detail, but enough that I can at least throw in a few well-timed intellectual-sounding comments. Actually, I’m not sure if these really do anything to improve my image, or if people are laughing at me behind my back. Still, I’ve learned that if you say anything with enough conviction, people will believe you.)

Of course, if all goes well, a few months later you end up dating. You then have to go on a real diet to lose all the love pounds (why does so much of dating revolve around feeding each other ice cream?), you forego all the pre-planned outfits for sweatpants (god I love sweatpants), and you more or less stop reading the news in favour of pointless Internet lists like this one.

And somehow it’s at this stage, when he’s peeing with the door open and you’re loudly singing along with Taylor Swift whenever you’re in the car, that you’re supposed to want to take the relationship to the serious let’s-commit-to-eventually-being-committed-forever level.

(For those of you who are scratching your heads at my made-up overly-hyphenated codewords, I’m talking about getting engaged.)

I may as well acknowledge now that it isn’t my rendition of Wildest Dreams that is ever going to win anyone over. It’s probably that I know how to make caramel apple upside-down gingerbread cake.